Favorite films

Recent reviews

• 

  La Haine 1995

  ★★★★★ Rewatched 29 Mar 2025

  Masterpiece.

• 

  Chungking Express 1994

  ★★★ Watched 26 Mar 2025

  I feel like with films that deal with loneliness, grief, heartache and love, if you’re going the “style over substance” route, the style has to replace the emotional weight the substance would have provided.
  
  Fallen Angels, this film’s spiritual successor, does a great job of that - the ultra-wide cinematography creates an entrancing yet lurid, hypnotic yet melancholic feeling just by *looking* at the film. It bolsters the themes at play within the writing and makes the whole thing a…

Popular reviews

• 

  Spirited Away 2001

  ★★½ Watched 22 Oct 2024 2

  Ghibli just isn’t for me it seems. Nothing really spoke to me in this film, I didn’t feel sucked in at all. 

  I think my main issue with Ghibli is that their films are more aesthetically and thematically driven than plot and character driven. I just don’t find that compelling. I’m not a plot-oriented viewer at all, and I think character can be expressed in many ways, it doesn’t just need to be a *person*.

  The world can be a…

• 

  A Fistful of Dollars 1964

  ★★★½ Watched 03 Mar 2025

  Obviously a solid film, great music, succinct storytelling and engaging characters. 

  The budget damages believability a bit for me, as you only see one street of the town, and it can feel difficult to place in your imagination because of that. Also, the mystique of the man with no name can hinder some plot beats. Him rescuing Marisol and vaguely alluding to knowing someone like her does inform us of his honour, but could have been more affecting had we…

Following